The way of communicating in mobile communications networks is subject to a significant change due to a development of the network infrastructure and the mobile terminals on the one hand and to the development of application software on the other hand.
Due to the rapid growth of smart phone penetration, data traffic over mobile networks is experiencing a significant growth. In the meantime, a huge number of smartphone applications have been developed, and especially applications associated to social networking have become very popular. Many smartphone applications have quite different traffic patterns compared to traditional voice services or data services. For example, with various social networking applications, people are instantaneously sharing information anytime and anyplace. Such applications often show rather low data utilization compared to control resource utilization, e.g. showing a large number of small packets with frequent radio resource control (RRC) state changes.
Existing mobile networks designed based on traditional traffic models are facing serious challenges, as the traffic pattern resulting from above-mentioned applications may lead to an inefficient use of networks resources.
According to ongoing discussion within 3GPP, smartphone application traffic can be classified as normal data traffic and small data traffic; small data traffic may be further classified as frequent small data traffic and infrequent small data traffic. For small data traffic, a problem to be tackled is called signaling storm, e.g. traffic consisting of a large number of signaling messages to convey small volume of data traffic.
To resolve problems resulted from certain smartphone traffic, many solutions from core network and radio access network aspect have been raised and discussed within 3GPP proposing an enhancement of UE, radio access network devices, and/or core network devices. UE dependent solutions however may need several years until a significant penetration is achieved. In the meantime, enhanced smartphone may coexist with non-enhanced smartphones.